Students I Have Loved and Lost

Concentrating my mind

I figured out today where this sense of sadness is coming from

I miss my students

I miss their laughter I miss their games

I miss their smiling shining eyes

The look in their eyes when they learn something new

Their bubbling confidence and joy

When their minds open up to new discoveries

I love when they hide behind me when they are shy of a stranger

They know I am their protector and their safety net

But they know I won’t be there to catch them forever

I am their teacher and their friend.

Their adventuring companion

Whose love never dies

Teachers are brutally honest

And expect morals to be upright

Teachers study all day

How to met the needs of every child.

They are balancing the hearts and minds

Of 10, 30, 150? Young humans

Carefully organizing the schedules,

Unwinding the misunderstandings

Dealing with parents, dealing with teens

Dealing with administrators

Cleaning vomit off the seats.

We are therapists

We are medics

We are first responders

We are authorities

We are under appreciated

We are so far from weak.

On a day I had a conference with a grandfather about how his grandson may have been physically abused by his son,

I literally cleaned poop off the walls.

And I was punched in the stomach and called a b***h by a 12-year-old child who was twice my size, but I love her to death and she knows it.

On the day I left for China, she gave me a card saying I was her favorite teacher. I just saw her for a few hours a few times a week. But the time we shared was… a lot. When she had a seizure for the first time - I was alone in a room with her and 13 other elementary school aged children.

I was on the phone with a parent about their preschool child’s fever that morning, when that 12-year-old girl’s younger brother ran up to me and yelled, “My sister is dead! Her lips are blue!”

Needless to say, I excused myself from the phone call.                

I rushed to her side, and at first genuinely believed she was just messing with her brother - she did things like this sometimes. But he was right. Her lips were blue. She wasn’t responding to my calling her name.

Then she twitched a few times.

I realized she was having a seizure. I knelt beside her and used my small body to pull her onto her side. I didn’t want her to drown in her own drool. I calmly told the other children that she wasn’t dying. I used my firm teacher voice to tell them to gather by the door and to give the girl space. I asked the older children to move the chairs away from her. If she had a bigger seizure, she could thrash and hurt herself. I asked the calmest child to stay beside her. I rushed back towards the phone and popped my head through the door to tell the teacher in the classroom next door to please call 911 and get my students to the gym immediately. He saw the look in my eyes and complied without question. We were used to nonverbally communicating about emergencies. As I hurried back to the girl’s side, he picked up the phone, dropped a line to the office to get the admins on the line, and they called 911 as the director hurried to my classroom to figure out the details. My priority was to stay by the girl’s side and keep her as safe as possible by any means necessary.

The area schools have a deal with the local EMS to always have ambulances nearby, so the “first responders” were there fast. I was cradling her head in my lap as she was coming to and they were speed walking through the door. They helped me move her onto the jumbo beanbag chair so she could rest. I sat beside her and held her as she kept asking what happened and where she was. We got her parents on the line and they agreed to come as fast as possible. Most teachers (of young children especially) memorize all of the medical issues/dietary restrictions/specific parenting desires/family dynamics and family member names for each and every one of their students.

I’ve witnessed bones being shattered, broken up fist fights, entertained groups of more than 100 children at a time, and calmly broke horrific news to panicked parents. All that on top of doing my “job”:

Meeting the state and national government “standards for education” for each student - As if true education can ever be entirely standardized. As if there is one correct set of information that will be necessary to get each person successfully through life. Benchmarks are helpful and important for guiding best practice - they are important for assessing data about student achievement. Data helps me see more clearly where a child is struggling. But reality is not always represented in the numbers carved out on standardized tests. My data on my students comes from careful observation and study of how they navigate the real world. I see which aspects of life they are unsure of - I see whether or not they have practical understandings of math and literacy.

I take countless anecdotal notes on my student’s interactions, behaviors, words, and choices. I then carefully analyze those notes in reference to what I know to be “typical” for children in their same age range. It was time consuming at first, but the more I practiced, the more it became like second nature. I still generally carry a notebook around with me while I teach, recording significant moments as they happen.

These little people - their challenges and dreams and dramas keep me up at night.

My first week of “student teaching,” one student tried to stab another over their 10-year-old boy crush. The situations we are expected to manage and resolve are often far above our “pay-grade.” I wasn’t even paid for that job… in fact, I was paying my university for the opportunity to work for 50+ hours a week in that school for three months. My mentor teacher was using her already low income to buy food and clothes for her most impoverished students - spending her weekends driving them to extracurricular science clubs.

Many public school teachers have to buy their own books and supplies. It seems like almost every ballot has an education millage, but I wonder sometimes where that money is truly going. Teachers and students certainly aren’t always seeing it. Not so fun fact: In 2019, there were high schools in Michigan that had 0% graduation rates. If students do poorly on standardized tests, their school loses funding. So those schools have fewer resources to meet the needs of their already underprivileged students. Teachers working in the most challenging environments with students in the most difficult circumstances get paid the least. I’m not sure how that makes sense to anyone… the system seems to kick people while they’re down.  

For a while, I worked with infants and toddlers. One little guy, just 14 months old, suffered from infantile febrile seizures, which had severely delayed his development. He couldn’t walk and couldn’t grip objects in his hands. He often vomited up everything he ate. I remember seeing the pride and glee in his eyes the first time he showed me how he could bring a spoonful of applesauce to his mouth without dropping it. At least not all of it. We taught him how to use a little walker so he could navigate more independently. Working in his classroom, I once changed 12 diapers in 10 minutes - without making any of the kids cry. We had the joyful baby assembly line carefully arranged. On one of my last days, that little boy had another seizure during nap time. Based on how long he seized (longer than 6 minutes) and the type (not just febrile anymore), the doctors predicted that he would be severely mentally impaired and may suffer from seizures for the rest of his life. He probably wouldn’t be able to hold a spoon anymore.

That was also the day I was suddenly asked to cook lunch for all 100+ kids in the school. I have to admit… I was a college student and hardly cooked lunch for myself, much less a picky and allergy-ridden hoard of babies. I remember watching from the kitchen as other teachers and eventually EMS and the child’s crying mother ran in and out of the classroom. I think I made minimum wage at that job, like most infant teachers do. And most infant/preschool teachers don’t get the summer breaks that public school teachers get. Early childhood educators get significantly lower salaries and significantly less time off than teachers of any other age group. That’s pretty messed up, especially considering that early childhood education is the foundation for everything that comes next. My goal here is not to complain, but to raise awareness for what the reality of the teaching entails.

The state-mandated ratio for very young infants was 1 teacher to 4 tiny babies. That means, on a given work day, I could be asked to spend 8 hours alone in a small room with 4 infants. No phone, no computer, no TV. Just me, four 2 to 6-month-old babies, hopefully enough bottles to feed them for the whole day, hopefully enough diapers and clean burp cloths and bibs, their cribs, one high chair, a CD player and 2 decent lullaby CDs (and maybe a Disney singalong CD if I was lucky), and a bunch of baby toys and pillow cushions.

Or it might be me and one other teacher. With 8 infants. And no bathroom breaks unless an administrator was available to step into the classroom for a moment.

Depending on the human, sometimes the tag team worked beautifully. But one coworker loved to joke about throwing the babies in the trash. The babies always cried when she walked in the room.

I learned there that babies absolutely have personalities. It is hard to ignore the personality of someone you are quite literally trapped in a room with. One little baby who undeniably held my heart would lock eyes with me when the other babies were crying. Her clear blue eyes seemed sympathetic and if she had been crying, she would stop and seem to say, “it’s okay, I can wait a moment.” Knowing I had seen and understood her, she would patiently wait for her bottle, babbling happily, until I had cleaned another’s explosive diaper and rocked another screaming child to sleep. She seemed to understand the priorities considering the circumstances.

We used a dry erase board to keep track of when every baby had its last diaper and bottle. Each child was on a different feeding schedule: a warm bottle of breastmilk or formula every 2-4 hours usually - warmed by soaking in warm water in the sink, not microwave because it could get too hot… though many of the babies struggled to use the bottle even when warmed because nothing compares to getting it straight from mama. Sometimes we’d have to get them to fall nearly asleep nursing on our fingers before we could slip the bottle into their mouths. I once managed to feed three babies at once when their feeding times happened to overlap perfectly - sitting on the floor cradling the one who could hold her own bottle while stretching forward to hold the bottles for two others who were propped up in C-shaped pillows - while stretching my leg out to tap my foot against the wheeled crib, hoping to start rocking the recently swaddled fourth baby to sleep.

Without that degree of constant attention, the screaming cries would begin.  We changed every diaper every 2 hours. Or sooner if they needed it. They often needed it sooner. The clock started whenever their parents changed them last before drop-off, so each baby was on a different schedule. And they were often dropped off with dirty diapers. It seemed almost inevitable that the worst poopy diapers would happen immediately after changing time or arrival for the day. But I’m honestly not trying to complain. That was just part of the job!

I once went back to visit some former students there. One boy I adored hadn’t been able to talk when I had left before (this was my uni summer job). We had used some basic sign language to communicate, but he was not quite ready for verbalizing. I had taught him when he was just 10 months old.  Every day when he arrived, he would spend five minutes just snuggled up on my lap with his favorite teddy bear. It was the only way he could say goodbye to his mom without too many tears. It was a lovely way to start my work day.

He was two and a half on the day I visited - It had been longer than a year since I had seen him last, so I feared he wouldn’t remember me. His current teachers warned me that he was quite shy. But he ran to me immediately, offered me a cracker and said, “Hi! Would you like a goldfish?” Those were the first words he had ever spoken to me. Who knows if he consciously remembered who I was, but something inside of him knew that I was safe to approach. I was his friend.

Being a teacher can be so deeply rewarding, but also incredibly heartbreaking. I can’t help but adore my students - but circumstances often require that I simply let them go after investing so much time and energy into their growth and development.

But I’ll never stop loving my students - past, present, and future.

My job is to give love. Unconditionally.

And also to raise awareness for the brokenness of our education systems.

I don’t know yet what the answer is,

but something’s gotta give.

Can’t stop won’t stop.